The Devil Wears Prada – The Nederlander Theatre – August 9, 2022

The show started about 15 minutes late. Given the heretofore mixed reviews (which I still haven’t read), I assumed last-second changes were being made to the script for this pre-Broadway run.

The opening set showed a New York street with a crosswalk in the foreground that made me wonder whether the Beatles were about to walk across the stage, Paul barefooted. Alas, no. Maybe after rewrites.

But the set that will linger in my mind was the Eiffel Tower, which rose spectacularly from the ground right before my eyes.

The opening scene of the second act, with finely dressed members of high society walking around, some with parasols, made me think of the Ascot Gavotte from My Fair Lady.

If it seems like the script didn’t have my full attention, I’ll mention that I probably was the only one there, including the actors and the writers, who got the joke when Andy threw her phone away because she no longer wanted to sell (cell?) her soul.

And, besides, because it’s still a work in progress, there’s no list of scenes or musical numbers in the playbill to aid my memory (and, surprisingly, I didn’t receive a press kit). But I know there was a song and dance about being in your twenties I liked a lot, and could remember if I still were.

Though I enjoyed it, the show is mostly about the costumes, the budget for which is probably somewhere around the gross national product of the Netherlands.

So, I clearly am not the target audience. There were a lot of crowd-pleasing fashion references about which I was gratefully clueless.

The whole cast was, of course, first rate, but I wanted to see more of Javier Munoz, who plays Nigel, the juicy role that Stanley Tucci had for dinner in the movie.